D&D 5E [+] Questions for zero character death players and DMs…

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, SoIaF is a good example of a story which pointedly uses “random” character deaths to underscore its tone and themes. The Walking Dead is another. The thing is, I disagree that such “random” deaths don’t affect the story at large. Those stories would have gone down very different paths had those characters not “randomly” died. And I think that’s the point of such deaths in D&D. They mark a significant turning point - all the stories that might have been told with the deceased character are now lost forever. The emergent story must now take a dramatically different turn.

I think my late Uncle would have disagreed with me on this matter fiercely. He was an author of some widely beloved Shadowrun fan fiction and hated SoIaF because of how it built up reader investment in characters only to unceremoniously kill them off. He read them anyway, because he felt reading diverse fiction helped him improve his own writing, but his copies of the books were full of notes he wrote in the margins, mostly ranting about what awful narrative choices he thought Martin made.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Yeah, SoIaF is a good example of a story which pointedly uses “random” character deaths to underscore its tone and themes. The Walking Dead is another.

Which, I mean is definitely a reason I don't like either.

Edit: Your uncle was a great and correct man.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think my late Uncle would have disagreed with me on this matter fiercely. He was an author of some widely beloved Shadowrun fan fiction and hated SoIaF because of how it built up reader investment in characters only to unceremoniously kill them off. He read them anyway, because he felt reading diverse fiction helped him improve his own writing, but his copies of the books were full of notes he wrote in the margins, mostly ranting about what awful narrative choices he thought Martin made.

For my part, all the "anyone can die, stories don't always get resolved, that's just how life is" rhetoric kinda collapsed when Jon Snow didn't die in the TV show. (Which, to be clear, I didn't watch.) Jon Snow was too important to actually die, so a pretty out-of-left-field excuse for his ability to survive being repeatedly stabbed was thrown in. It's clear that Martin actually has a central narrative to tell and characters that are important to telling it, which makes all those "anyone can die" things feel disingenuous and manipulative, revealing the hand of the author. Further, at least some of the early so-called random deaths really aren't random at all--yes, they cut short an individual character's plausible story arc, but that being-cut-short element is critical to several other characters' arcs. The death of Ned Stark, for example, was very much an intentional narrative device, scattering his children to the wind. (He was secretly a mentor character disguised as a main hero, which is an interesting subversion of expectations...unfortunately most of the other deaths are pretty random and don't go much of anywhere.)

For my part, the main issue with having such a heavy emphasis on the emergent story is the same as the issue I have as an outsider hearing about Game of Thrones: if I know most of the characters I'm interested in are gonna die with unresolved arcs and dull, uninteresting deaths, all investment and interest I have in the story drains away (and this is replaced with negative interest upon learning that actually plot-critical characters will be saved from death, as noted above.)

If your character dies unceremoniously, with no resolution, you're left pining for what could have been, and for me (and, I strongly suspect, for my players) that would poison the potential enjoyment of any replacement character. As W.S. Merwin wrote: "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color." I'll be pining for what could have been, dwelling on the loss, wondering what the point of getting invested into this character is when it's just going to be taken from me like the one before it, etc.

This is why so much of the stuff about "I can't get invested unless I know death is an option" stuff just...doesn't work for me, just falls completely flat. Because for me, if I'm constantly fearing that I'm going to lose my character or dreading the loss of yet another effort, I'm going to disconnect. Why invest into something that, mathematically, you're going to lose eventually?

Essentially, when death has no meaning, then life has no value.

 

[Voranzovin]

When I DM deathless campaigns—and I’m doing one right now—I use hit points but not death saves. Hitting zero hit points, wether you are a PC or NPC, means you are defeated. What that entails depends on the situation. You might be injured and unable to fight until you receive healing. You might be restrained by a stronger opponent so thoroughly you can’t escape. You might surrender (if the player chooses). The important part is that you lost, and hit points are still useful for figuring out whether you lost or not.

As an aside, I like DMing this way in part because I can then remove resurrection from the game. I find accepting a universe that works on “Avatar rules”—there’s danger and action but somehow nobody dies because that’s how the genre works—much easier then accepting a universe where anyone can come back from the dead if a priest asks nicely and has some diamonds.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Also, most of the time even authors who just kill heaps of characters to show how kewl they are, they're actually killing characters who have already served their narrative purpose.

It takes a real goof to annihilate actual ongoing plotlines because they feel like offing a character. That's usually where your editor sends the manuscript back with just a big, red question mark on it.

Mostly we see this in comics, but now that we have semi-independent internet studios, we're seeing a lot of this kind of blunder that would never get past network execs coming to being. I've fallen off on a show that pulled this kind of crap and recently found out that they brought back a character they killed for no reason-- only to kill them again only harder and for less reason a season later. Both times after laying the groundwork for larger narrative with them and the second time, right after completely negating their character arc to make sure it was permanent this time.

 

[Charlaquin]

For my part, all the "anyone can die, stories don't always get resolved, that's just how life is" rhetoric kinda collapsed when Jon Snow didn't die in the TV show. (Which, to be clear, I didn't watch.) Jon Snow was too important to actually die, so a pretty out-of-left-field excuse for his ability to survive being repeatedly stabbed was thrown in. It's clear that Martin actually has a central narrative to tell and characters that are important to telling it, which makes all those "anyone can die" things feel disingenuous and manipulative, revealing the hand of the author.

Well, he did actually die, he just got literally resurrected not long after. In the show, which had outpaced the books by that point, and it’s not clear that his death is going to be flollowed up in the same way in the books (for example, the character who resurrected him in the show is in a completely different part of the world than she was at the time in the show, so whatever ends up happening, it almost certainly won’t be the same as what happened in the show). But, yes, it is accurate that Martin did/does have a story, and characters’ deaths or survival happen because they need to for that story to work. Anyone who thought otherwise while reading or watching the series was confused about how narratives work.

Further, at least some of the early so-called random deaths really aren't random at all--yes, they cut short an individual character's plausible story arc, but that being-cut-short element is critical to several other characters' arcs. The death of Ned Stark, for example, was very much an intentional narrative device, scattering his children to the wind. (He was secretly a mentor character disguised as a main hero, which is an interesting subversion of expectations...

True! Again, that’s kind of how narrative works.

unfortunately most of the other deaths are pretty random and don't go much of anywhere.)

I don’t think that’s really very true; most major characters’ deaths do have a significant impact on the story and other characters, even more so in the books, but in the show as well. They often seem “random” because they occur unexpectedly, but they aren’t truly insignificant. They kinda can’t be because again, that’s not how narratives work.

For my part, the main issue with having such a heavy emphasis on the emergent story is the same as the issue I have as an outsider hearing about Game of Thrones: if I know most of the characters I'm interested in are gonna die with unresolved arcs and dull, uninteresting deaths, all investment and interest I have in the story drains away (and this is replaced with negative interest upon learning that actually plot-critical characters will be saved from death, as noted above.)

And that’s fair. More emergent story type play probably isn’t right for you; no one can fault you for that, it’s just a preference, and an understandable one.

If your character dies unceremoniously, with no resolution, you're left pining for what could have been, and for me (and, I strongly suspect, for my players) that would poison the potential enjoyment of any replacement character. As W.S. Merwin wrote: "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color." I'll be pining for what could have been, dwelling on the loss, wondering what the point of getting invested into this character is when it's just going to be taken from me like the one before it, etc.

I think that’s kinda the point. That is how death feels (the quote was about actual death after all). In my opinion that pining for what could have been is what makes character deaths meaningful, and therefore what makes character lives meaningful.

This is why so much of the stuff about "I can't get invested unless I know death is an option" stuff just...doesn't work for me, just falls completely flat. Because for me, if I'm constantly fearing that I'm going to lose my character or dreading the loss of yet another effort, I'm going to disconnect. Why invest into something that, mathematically, you're going to lose eventually?

Essentially, when death has no meaning, then life has no value.

See, the last sentence seems to me to be at odds with the preceding paragraph because, yes, I agree that when death has no meaning, life has no value. And it is the weight of loss that accompanies a death that gives it meaning. If a character only dies if I want them to, what meaning is there in that death? What meaning is there in their life? It was all just a contrived fantasy, not something truly fragile and precious. I can understand why that doesn’t work for everyone, of course. That’s some heavy stuff and I imagine most people are in the game more for escape than catharsis. But again, I think to say that kind of unpredictable character death has no place in a character story focused campaign is not really fair. It can have a very important place in such a campaign (though it certainly doesn’t have to).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think that’s kinda the point. That is how death feels (the quote was about actual death after all). In my opinion that pining for what could have been is what makes character deaths meaningful, and therefore what makes character lives meaningful.

See, the last sentence seems to me to be at odds with the preceding paragraph because, yes, I agree that when death has no meaning, life has no value. And it is the weight of loss that accompanies a death that gives it meaning. If a character only dies if I want them to, what meaning is there in that death? What meaning is there in their life? It was all just a contrived fantasy, not something truly fragile and precious. I can understand why that doesn’t work for everyone, of course. That’s some heavy stuff and I imagine most people are in the game more for escape than catharsis. But again, I think to say that kind of unpredictable character death has no place in a character story focused campaign is not really fair. It can have a very important place in such a campaign (though it certainly doesn’t have to).

Perhaps, then, this is the issue.

I see a death caused by the dice--a death that just happened, with no context, no resolution, broken stories that will never ever get anything more than an "oh, yeah I guess that happened" is the antithesis of interesting to me. It's saying you should get super duper ultra invested in a story you KNOW will only get half-told, and then peter out into nothing.

Whereas it seems like, for you, the point here is exploring a "narrative interruptus." I just...don't actually see that happen with characters who die due to Random Kobold #6 getting a crit or Stupidly Bad Luck Climbing A Steep Cliff. I don't see players asking questions like, "What happens now? How do people grieve? Can we move on? Should we?" I see Pam VII, Second Cousin Twice Removed of Pam VI. Or I see (as mentioned upthread) that some random mercenary just joins up with the party out of nowhere, and almost instantly slips back into the same camaraderie and presence in the group.

There is almost never an actual period of mourning, of falling into weird coping mechanisms, of genuinely asking what one is going to do. There's no vengeance to swear against, because the source was something so mundane and dull it doesn't merit such a thing, it's just the world being a sucky place. Maybe you try to take up a quest or goal of the dead character, but such an "I am Spartacus" response is effectively a denial of the original death anyway (the dead character so, so easily becomes a Flanderized subset of the character that takes up the quest.)

Would you agree? It very much seems to me that there's this baked-in assumption that everyone becomes deeply introspective and demonstrates a nuanced and thorough-going investigation of the loss and resulting difficulty etc. and...I just don't see that assumption play out. Players move on way too quickly because three weeks out from the death, you have more pertinent concerns, and the gap between player feelings and character feelings makes grief not very interesting.

And the only way I've found to actually get that sort of introspection and nuance and investigation is to talk about this sort of thing in advance. To get people on board with the story, thinking about the directions it could go, etc. Which is only the tiniest bit different from, y'know, just handling the death differently. E.g. you can still get all those delicious "how do we move on, should we move on" etc. questions by having a lengthy quest to save the dead character from their fate, which can have a huge list of negative consequences all on its own.

 

[Li Shenron]

First of all, I do not technically run "zero character death" games, but as I wrote countless times in these forums, I instead rather make the player decide if they are comfortable with their character's death or not, in which case the whole group discusses an alternative penalty to death that fits the story.

Since nothing happens if you fail three death saves, do they stay in the game? Are they tracked? Do you make the roll? If your character can’t die, why bother rolling?

Yes they are still rolled and tracked because (a) some players will choose to accept death and (b) those who choose a penalty still have a way to avoid it.

What about hit points? If the end result of hitting zero hit points is ultimately nothing, why track them? If you do track hit points, what happens at zero? Are characters unconscious until someone revives them at zero hit points? Are they out of the combat until it’s over? How does it work?

Same reason as above, plus the fact that even if there was no death-alternative penalty, reaching zero HP would still mean to become unconscious and off the battle, which itself is something that a player would want to avoid.

Are monsters also immune to death or are their hit points still tracked and they’re as gleefully slaughtered as in every other style of play?

I run the monsters, so I decide if some of them shall not really die for story reasons.

Finally, what benefit is gained by having no character death?

Some players have a hard time coping with their character's death. A player might have envisioned a good character development story, and dying too early will cut it short. Or they might have invested a lot of time in character building, get the feeling it was all wasted time, and ask "why bother?" and switch to play only trivial Bob's the Fighters from that point on. Other players get emotionally attach to their PC for their own reasons, and take it personally if they lose them.

The gaming community is large and includes people with different expectations about even the nature of the game itself. Since I (and maybe them too) usually do not know before we play, I keep this sort of door open to protect players from these eventualities.

 

[Li Shenron]

For my part, all the "anyone can die, stories don't always get resolved, that's just how life is" rhetoric kinda collapsed when Jon Snow didn't die in the TV show. (Which, to be clear, I didn't watch.) Jon Snow was too important to actually die, so a pretty out-of-left-field excuse for his ability to survive being repeatedly stabbed was thrown in. It's clear that Martin actually has a central narrative to tell and characters that are important to telling it, which makes all those "anyone can die" things feel disingenuous and manipulative, revealing the hand of the author. Further, at least some of the early so-called random deaths really aren't random at all--yes, they cut short an individual character's plausible story arc, but that being-cut-short element is critical to several other characters' arcs. The death of Ned Stark, for example, was very much an intentional narrative device, scattering his children to the wind. (He was secretly a mentor character disguised as a main hero, which is an interesting subversion of expectations...unfortunately most of the other deaths are pretty random and don't go much of anywhere.)

For my part, the main issue with having such a heavy emphasis on the emergent story is the same as the issue I have as an outsider hearing about Game of Thrones: if I know most of the characters I'm interested in are gonna die with unresolved arcs and dull, uninteresting deaths, all investment and interest I have in the story drains away (and this is replaced with negative interest upon learning that actually plot-critical characters will be saved from death, as noted above.)

If your character dies unceremoniously, with no resolution, you're left pining for what could have been, and for me (and, I strongly suspect, for my players) that would poison the potential enjoyment of any replacement character. As W.S. Merwin wrote: "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color." I'll be pining for what could have been, dwelling on the loss, wondering what the point of getting invested into this character is when it's just going to be taken from me like the one before it, etc.

This is why so much of the stuff about "I can't get invested unless I know death is an option" stuff just...doesn't work for me, just falls completely flat. Because for me, if I'm constantly fearing that I'm going to lose my character or dreading the loss of yet another effort, I'm going to disconnect. Why invest into something that, mathematically, you're going to lose eventually?

Essentially, when death has no meaning, then life has no value.

Very well said!

It made me think... among those who claim "I can't get invested unless I know death is an option", would you play a game where, should your PC die, you will not have an option to create another PC in the same campaign and will have to wait until next campaign to play again with the same group?

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

My D&D is a game of larger than life fantasy heroes. Hence, the threat of death is theoretically there, but with a table of players that know adventuring 101 it pretty much never happens. Or if it happens, the characters are resurrected or whatnot. And that's how my group likes it.

When we play OSR stuff, Call of Cthulhu or Warhammer Fantasy roleplaying, character death is pretty common.

It's different games, with different play styles and expectations, and in my opinion, trying to play current edition D&D with high character body count is a mismatch.